Firm Develops Optical Disc - for Cell Phones
Indian manufacturer Spice Mobile on Tuesday introduced a phone with a built-in optical disc player, the first of its kind, here at the Mobile World Congress trade show.
VMedia produces a 1.2", blue laser optical disk that holds one gigabyte per layer. Current discs have one layer, which is good enough to hold a 3.5-hour Bollywood movie in H.264 format at 720x576 resolution, Packman said. The company is working on a 2GB disk for next year, he said.
In an era when everyone's talking about moving to online media, physical media still has a commanding presence in sales, Packman said.
About that online media - while streaming to a cell phone isn't likely to become that popular at current speeds, you could just rip the movie to a SD card instead. After all, those Vmedia discs are tiny and easy to lose. SD cards are tiny, but they usually just stay in the phone.
Besides which, although the Bollywood angle is obvious because of the Indian carrier, don't expect U.S. studios to jump into yet another disc format.
This is an idea that seems likely to go nowhere.
